Toke Signals: This Is How You Do It

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Medical-marijuana farmers markets are the purest form of patient empowerment short of growing your own.

Related Content

It’s a paradigm-changer. With booths lined up side by side, patients are in the driver’s seat. If one farmer/vendor doesn’t have the strains or the prices you’re looking for, keep walking—there’s another booth right there. And you can try the medicine, on the spot, at many booths—lots of them keep a pipe on hand just for that purpose.

Not only does this exert downward pressure on prices through good old free-market competition, but it also puts upward pressure on quality, because if your strains or medibles don’t measure up to your neighbors’, guess where folks are going to spend their money?

The parking lot was almost full by the time I arrived at the Kitsap Cannabis Farmers Fair recently (they’re held every Saturday in Gorst, just east of Bremerton), but I was able to secure a spot right in front of the building, a converted church house.

As an illustration of the deep local roots the vendors have, one of the couples with a booth at the fair, Wink and Diana (Diana’s World of Canna Beauty & Skin Health), got married in this very building a few years ago; now they vend an expanding line of cannabis-infused topical products from the same fair location each Saturday. (If your feet are sore, you really should check out the Diana’s World foot balm . . . it got me through the second and third days of Hempfest this year.)

Once you’ve shown your medical-marijuana paperwork and Washington ID at the door (both are required for entrance), you’re free to browse at your leisure among booths numbering just over a dozen on the Saturday I visited. The booths that day were predominantly vending flowers and concentrates, but with several medibles vendors also on hand, a good selection of treats was easy to find.

The default price for top-shelf cannabis flowers at the Farmers Fair is $10 a gram, but a little shopping around will yield some bargains; I saw grams for as low as $7. Top-shelf ounces averaged around $200, but there were $150 ounces available as well, and I saw some bargain-basement ounces for as low as $75.

Even the pickiest connoisseur, though, can find plenty to love at $10 a gram. I found some spectacular Ripper Haze at that price, and can definitely say that it puts to shame quite a few strains for which I’ve paid $12 or $14 in Seattle. The same goes for the big, gorgeous flowers of Jack Z I found; for some Inland Empire Kush with an inviting, slightly cheesy smell; and for some scraggly but potent Afgoo. I was happy to have all three for $10.

If you want to see what I’m talking about when I say “medical-marijuana community,” check out this market.